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Saturday, 4 December 2010

Using Geocam in the classroom

Geocam has, at the moment, over 1000 cameras stationed throughout the world, constantly streaming images to your computer. You navigate around Geocam as you would in Google Maps. See the image above. Since it's streaming live, it's perfect as a tool to get students speaking in the present continuous. Be warned that since it's streaming images, you'd need a decent internet connection.

Of course, you don't have to restrict yourself to the present continuous. Students can practise the simple present and adjectives by describing the image. You can always ask them to choose the location themselves.

You can work on simple past by freezing a couple of images and asking them to compare the differences. See below.

You can practise predictions (future or past, depending on the point you freeze the images) as in the picture below:

What do you think they had been doing/are going to do? (Actually, the baby had to pee!)

It can also be used to demonstrate differences between countries, such as the time, the weather, etc.

If you have other interesting ideas on how to use Geocam in the classroom, please do share them with us here.